Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  Their dispute escalated after the Communists shelled Can Tho on April 11. The half-hour attack killed civilians and ignited fires that raged through the city’s wooden buildings. Only a change in the wind and a heavy rain saved the consulate. Delaney said it proved that a large North Vietnamese force was preparing to attack the city; McNamara’s sources told him it was a diversion meant to keep ARVN forces pinned down in the delta. But, to be on the safe side, McNamara bought a flat-bottomed rice barge and began searching for other vessels. He ordered official Americans and his A-category people to withdraw from outlying provinces into Can Tho and started sending some to Saigon to join the embassy’s evacuation.

  Following the shelling of Can Tho, Jake Jacobson summoned McNamara to a meeting at the DAO with the service attachés and military officers from Thailand and the Seventh Fleet. During the meeting Jacobson declared his opposition to McNamara’s riverine evacuation, arguing that although the Vietcong did not have a navy, they could still open fire from the shoreline. When he announced that all Americans and third-country nationals would fly out of Can Tho, McNamara shot back, “I refuse to accept that decision.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “In the Shadow of a Corkscrew”

  At a State Department staff meeting on April 2, one day after the Nha Trang evacuation, Kissinger argued that the United States was responsible for Thieu’s mistakes because, as he put it, “we picked the little guy [Thieu]. That is what started the whole thing. After that he acted like a maniac. Unless you think he deliberately committed suicide.”

  Kissinger and Assistant Secretary of State Habib took turns criticizing Martin. Habib reported that after Martin had received a cable requesting his assessment of the situation, he had called the State Department asking “what this was all about.”

  “I know it is sort of unreasonable, when a country is collapsing, to ask the Ambassador what is going on,” Kissinger remarked sarcastically, missing the point that Martin did not believe it was collapsing.

  “The press is beginning to write that the Embassy is not reporting,” Habib complained, “and young officers are beginning to complain that they are not permitted to send forward reports of the situation.”

  Lawrence Eagleburger, Kissinger’s executive secretary, said that when Martin asked him, “Why do you need an assessment?” he had replied, “The Secretary [Kissinger] would like to know what the hell is going on and all we have are newspaper reports.”

  Several hours later, Kissinger chaired a meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group on Vietnam and Cambodia. During a discussion of whether South Vietnam would fall during the summer rainy season, Kissinger wondered if the end might come within the next three months.

  “I would say we should be prepared for collapse within three weeks,” Secretary of Defense Schlesinger said.

  “Basically, then, nothing can be done?” Kissinger asked.

  “I can’t think of anything,” Schlesinger replied, adding, “General Weyand, in my telephone conversations with him, is much more pessimistic than when he first got out there. He’s quite grim about the situation. And he’s talking mostly to those who are optimistic.”

  After hearing more discouraging assessments, Kissinger said, “Martin should begin preparing a plan for evacuation.”

  “We should push him hard on that,” Schlesinger said. “We ought to clear out all non-essentials—and fast.” He made it clear later that by “non-essentials” he was referring to the American employees of U.S. government agencies in South Vietnam, not the agencies’ Vietnamese employees.

  Kissinger raised the issue of the Vietnamese, saying, “I think we owe—it’s our duty—to get the people who believed in us out,” and asking if anyone had compiled a list of them.

  Habib believed such a list existed but called it “limited.”

  “Tell Graham Martin to give us a list of those South Vietnamese we need to get out of the country,” Kissinger said. “Tell Graham that we must have the list by tomorrow [April 3].”

  Habib said the list had ninety-three thousand names but did not specify who had compiled it or where it was.

  Kissinger asked him to get it, adding, “We’ll try for as many as we can.”

  Ken Quinn’s boss, Bill Stearman, warned that they could be talking about evacuating a million people.

  Unfazed by this number, Kissinger said, “Well, this is one thing this Congress can’t refuse—humanitarian aid to get people out,” a remark suggesting that in addition to its humanitarian aspect an evacuation of endangered Vietnamese appealed to him as a cudgel to use against Congress. As the meeting was concluding, he said, “Let’s get that list of people who have to get out and some ideas of where we should move them. We may have to ask Congress for military force to help rescue these people. I can’t see how they could refuse.”

  According to the meeting’s official Summary of Conclusions, “Embassy Saigon would prepare, by April 3, 1975, a detailed breakdown by categories and numbers of those Vietnamese the US should evacuate from South Vietnam. The breakdown is to be organized in order of priorities and should include recommendations regarding necessary arrangements with the GVN [government of South Vietnam], transport, safe havens, and staging areas.” Kissinger followed up with a cable ordering Martin to make these preparations and arrange “immediately” for the departure during the next several days of “all remaining dependents of official Americans, including to the extent possible dependents of contractor personnel.”

  Martin did none of this. He never sent Kissinger, either on April 3 or during the following weeks, a “detailed breakdown” of endangered Vietnamese. Instead of initiating any meaningful planning for their “transport, safe havens, and staging areas,” he discouraged embassy personnel from engaging in such planning. He responded to Kissinger’s demands the next day with a cable titled “E and E [Emergency and Evacuation] Planning.” He argued that he had to observe the “knife-edge balance” between planning for an evacuation and avoiding anything that might “set off or significantly contribute to a panic situation endangering American lives” and could have “wider repercussions on the overall political-military situation”—that is, undermine the morale of South Vietnam’s government and armed forces.

  Instead of the “detailed breakdown” of at-risk Vietnamese that Kissinger had demanded, he supplied estimates. He calculated that if the embassy evacuated the 17,000 Vietnamese employed by the U.S. mission in South Vietnam and permitted each employee to bring out eight family members (a number vastly underestimating what Vietnamese considered a family), it would amount to 136,000 people. Add to them an estimated 10,000 Vietnamese relatives of U.S. citizens, hundreds of high-ranking South Vietnamese government officials and their families, and you had 200,000 potential evacuees. Divide that number by half on the assumption that many would choose to remain in Vietnam, and, he wrote, “for planning purposes we should use the figure of 100,000 for [those] whose safety the USG [U.S. government] will have a definite moral responsibility.” After acknowledging “major practical problems” in evacuating “such large numbers of Vietnamese nationals” and settling them in the United States, he added, “If we are to emerge with the slightest vestige of honor, given the history of American involvement in Vietnam, the only right thing to do must be to move these people to the US and resolve any legal problems by special legislation later.”

  Martin was offering here the same moral justifications for evacuating Vietnamese nationals as were those in Washington and Saigon who considered him their implacable foe. He was realistic about the difficulty of mounting an evacuation, recognized that America’s honor was at stake, and proposed disregarding U.S. immigration regulations. Still, he refused to authorize planning and preparations for the kind of large-scale operation that could have accomplished this. The most likely explanation for his apparently contradictory behavior is either that he was determined to manage the timing and scope of
any evacuation himself or that he had sent this cable so that the record would show him attempting to preside over an honorable exit. His cable was either a window on the soul of this secretive man or chaff shot up to distract his enemies and future historians.

  Kissinger would later come down on the side of chaff—of Martin’s cables being self-serving communications composed with an eye cocked toward future historians—later writing, “I knew very well that Martin’s many hortatory messages were designed in part to create a record that might later be published—perhaps even to my disadvantage.”

  The same charge of composing cables and making statements at meetings with an eye toward history could also be leveled at Kissinger, whose actions, at least during the first half of April, never quite matched his own hortatory remarks about the moral urgency of evacuating America’s Vietnamese allies. His comments to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee during an April 9 telephone conversation also call into question his sincerity. He told Bradlee, “What worries me is, you know, there are hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese towards whom we must at least make a show [italics added] of trying to save their lives.”

  Martin responded to the WSAG request that he evacuate U.S. dependents with a blistering April 5 cable marked “personal and absolutely eyes only for Secretary Kissinger.” He reported that the CIA had recorded Major General Nguyen Ngoc Loan telling his staff that troops guarding Tan Son Nhut should be ordered to prevent any evacuation of Americans unless they were accompanied by “all the Vietnamese who wanted to go as well.” Loan was the officer who had been photographed during the Tet Offensive executing a Vietcong prisoner with a bullet to the head in broad daylight on a Saigon boulevard, so Martin, Polgar, and others in Washington took his threat seriously. Referring to the Loan recording, Martin criticized the WSAG request as “the kind of action that can result in the wholly needless death of a lot of Americans, plunge this city into total chaos, and irretrievably throw away any chance we might have of salvaging anything at all of American policy interests in this area.” He was also critical of the request because, he said, it had been “taken without prior consultation with me.”

  He blamed Habib, of course, and demanded that Kissinger “instruct my friend, Habib, to cool it a bit, to not react to panic pressures.” He recommended that “some safety device be put on the ‘panic button’ ” and threatened to resign, telling Kissinger, “You either have confidence that my judgment on the scene is quite likely to be better than that of Habib or [Deputy Secretary of State] Ingersoll in Washington or you ought to recommend to the President that he put one of them out here and relieve me.” If that happened, he warned, he might go public, adding coyly, “In that case, perhaps I can make an even greater contribution by speaking out with complete candor on how we got in this current situation.” He concluded, “If you and the President wish me to continue, I shall use my judgment…on those matters [that is, the timing of an evacuation] which can only be decided here in the light of the actual realities on the ground, and I will be grateful if you so instruct Habib.”

  Within hours Kissinger responded with his own blistering cable. He opened by telling Martin, “I am not at all pleased with the way we are approaching the difficult question of evacuation,” saying that if they lost their “composure” over this matter, they also risked losing “lives, national dignity, and a common sense of confidence that we can manage whatever crisis the future may hold.” With this in mind, he declared that he had established procedures that Martin must follow when dealing with the issue of an evacuation. He ordered, “You should comment without delay once you have received advance warning that certain measures [concerning an evacuation] may be under consideration.” Once orders had been issued, he could lodge an appeal through Kissinger’s deputy Brent Scowcroft. But then, Kissinger wrote, “if your appeal fails, you should execute the orders without complaint and without deviation unless extraordinary circumstances on the ground so dictate.” He also reminded Martin that he had asked him to submit “urgently” a “comprehensive plan for evacuation” that would serve as the government’s “basis of our overall plan…unless superseded in part or in whole by instructions from me.”

  For the next several weeks Martin continued to disregard Kissinger’s requests for evacuation lists, comprehensive plans, and immediate and precipitate reductions in the numbers of Americans and their Vietnamese dependents. He knew that Kissinger would not recall him and leave the post empty at such a critical juncture. For the moment, he had beaten back Habib and the other State Department “mattress mice,” but his opposition to planning an evacuation had aroused the mattress mice in his own embassy and at the DAO.

  * * *

  —

  After the Communists seized Phuoc Long, the U.S. defense attaché, Major General Homer Smith, had spent sleepless nights worrying about how to evacuate the DAO’s 850 American civilian employees and its 3,500 Vietnamese employees and their families. He was a logistician, an expert in moving military supplies and personnel to staging areas and battlefields, and his straightforward Texan manner and angular cowboy face reinforced his reputation for being a man who could move anything or anyone anywhere. He had learned his trade as a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant on a team planning the D-day invasion of France, the largest, most complicated logistical operation in military history. During his first tour in Vietnam he had held several demanding logistical positions, including head of mortuary affairs. He had made himself visit the morgue every day to remind himself of the cost of the war and because he felt duty-bound, he said, “to send the soldiers off.” He brought this same humanity and decency to his position as U.S. defense attaché.

  After reading the official evacuation plans for the embassy and the U.S. military, he concluded that the same flaw compromised both: the assumption that tens of thousands of evacuees could travel in convoys of cars and buses to Tan Son Nhut and the port of Vung Tau and that South Vietnamese police and troops would protect these facilities and the evacuees. But if that was the case, he wondered, then why in heaven would the United States want to evacuate its citizens and others in the first place? And why would anyone with a basic understanding of human nature and South Vietnam imagine that the country’s police and military would risk their lives to help the citizens of an ally that was abandoning them to escape? His deputy, air force brigadier general Richard Baughn, read the plans and agreed that they were inadequate and illogical. Baughn also noticed that they made no provisions for evacuating the Vietnamese employees of U.S. agencies or Vietnamese and Americans from the consular regions outside Saigon.

  In mid-March, Smith asked three of his uniformed officers at the DAO to produce an evacuation plan that anticipated Saigon being in a state of near anarchy. He gave the assignment to Captain George Petrie, Major Jaime Sabater Jr., and Marine Corps Captain Tony Wood and told them to report to Baughn. The three soldiers had between them about ten years of experience fighting in South Vietnam and losing comrades and risking their lives. Sabater considered Smith’s assignment a last chance to accomplish something noble before he left Vietnam forever.

  Smith told them that he wanted a plan that identified the locations of Americans, third-country nationals, and Vietnamese who were most likely to suffer retribution under a Communist regime. It should provide for their transportation under hostile conditions to Tan Son Nhut and Saigon’s docks, explain how these facilities would be protected, and how the DAO compound could be prepared to accommodate ten thousand evacuees for ten days. The three officers decided to call themselves the Special Planning Group (SPG) and to name their plan to fortify the DAO “Project Alamo.”

  Smith created a second organization, the Evacuation Control Center (ECC), and gave it the job of coordinating all seaborne and airborne evacuations mounted by U.S. government agencies and military commands, including the SPG. He also placed Brigadier General Baughn in charge of the ECC and summoned him, the three military attachés, and the E
CC and SPG staff to a brainstorming session on the afternoon of April 1, just as Consul General Spear was abandoning his Vietnamese employees at the Nha Trang airport and a reliable Communist agent was telling his CIA handler that Hanoi was on a “blood scent” and would demand an unconditional surrender.

  The SPG came up with the idea of turning downtown rooftops into helipads and sold the plan to Air America and the marines. It compiled a register of the addresses of Americans and third-country nationals by scrutinizing PX liquor ration cards, billeting records, and the membership rolls of the embassy’s Combined Recreation Association and the Cercle Sportif. It used the U.S. mission’s employment records to locate potential Vietnamese evacuees, covering a wall map of Saigon with colored pins showing where they and the Americans lived and plotting bus routes that connected the proposed collection points. Captain Wood named the routes after pioneer trails, calling them Oregon, Santa Fe, and Chisholm, and became known as the Wagon Master.

  The SPG planned to collect its evacuees in forty-two DAO buses guided by an equal number of sedans. It had the sedans painted black and white and equipped with blue roof lights so that they resembled South Vietnamese police squad cars. It designated two FM frequencies for command and control and installed an antenna on the DAO water tower to provide communication between the buses and the Evacuation Control Center. It recruited American expatriates to sit in the passenger seats of the sedans and guide the drivers down Captain Wood’s trails, recruited more expats and Vietnamese DAO employees to drive the buses or ride them as armed guards, and gave them flak jackets, gas masks, and smoke grenades. The average age of the drivers and guards was forty-eight, and most had never been behind the wheel of a bus. The SPG had them move a bus back and forth in the DAO parking lot, then drive it around the compound, and finally make practice runs to familiarize themselves with the city’s roadblocks and checkpoints. Major Sabater sometimes grabbed an automatic weapon and made what he called “kamikaze runs,” driving over the routes after curfew to identify new roadblocks.